With education institutions, especially pre-primaries and K-12 schools, shuttered for over nine months since mid-March because of fear of infection from the Coronavirus, aka Covid-19 pandemic, pitiful tragedies are being played out in millions of households across the country. The majority of India’s 480 million children are not only suffering loss of learning, but also hunger, malnutrition and escalating domestic violence and abuse while sequestered in squalid homes. For the country’s 140 million children in government schools, especially state and local government-managed anganwadis (pre-primary) and primary schools, attending conventional brick-n-mortar schools is of critical importance because in-school children are entitled to a free-of-charge mid-day meal which in many cases is the only daily meal they get.

State governments have been repeatedly setting school reopening dates and postponing them. With this back and forth, over three-fourths the school year has elapsed with children cooped up in small, overcrowded homes — the average home in this country beggared by persisting neta-babu socialism is a mere 499 sq. ft.

Although there is much blather about online and distance learning, for the overwhelming majority of children from low-income households enrolled in government schools, this is a cruel joke. The plain truth is that they are perhaps at greater risk of contracting the dread virus in crowded, insanitary homes as they would be in school. Moreover, they are not only being deprived of learning, they are also at risk of forgetting what they have learned thus far.

Clearly dilly-dallying on the issue of reopening schools is not so much driven by anxiety about their contracting the Covid virus as by fear of the political consequences of large numbers of children in ill-maintained and poorly administered government schools taking ill. Invariably, over-focused on short-term electoral prospects, post-independence India’s political class has never grasped the centrality of education for national development as evidenced by its consistent failure to raise the annual outlay (Centre plus states) for public education to 6 percent of GDP, first recommended by the Kothari Commission (1967) and over half a dozen commissions since.

Though there is admittedly the possibility that a considerable number of in-school children could catch the virus, if elementary safety precautions such as mandatory sanitisation of premises, face masking, safe distancing and alternate days attendance are prescribed and practised, schools are likely to be markedly safer than home environments for the vast majority of government school students. The Central and state governments need to bite the bullet on this issue and mandate the restart of schools, subject to elementary precautions and parental consent. Every day’s delay is extracting a heavier price from India’s long-suffering children.

Also read: School reopening guidelines: Education ministry issues SOPs